Observation: Hatcher Pass

We toured up the route towards the glacier pass into the hanging valley and skied low apron slopes on the East side of Didilkama Peak. We encountered evidence of numerous natural avalanches from earlier in the week with large debris piles running nearly to the summer trail to snowbird. The snow in the hanging valley showed surprisingly little wind effect, with a few small wind pillows on northwest aspects and a just noticeable “grandma skin” on East and Southeast aspects. We dug a pit an performed CT test on a test slope at about 4200 feet that faced directly East and was about 37 degrees. We were not able to trigger the column by impacting the shovel. The snowpack here was 160 cm deep. The rain crust was about 75 cm from the surface and there were nearly 50 cm of facets at the base! Question: Have you observed differences in snowpack on mine tailings? I think we ended up skiing a tailings pile and we’re wondering if the snowpack would be significantly different on that surface.